One test was the so-called Duncker candle problem. Subjects are posed with three objects, sitting on a table next to a cardboard wall: A candle, a box of matches, and a box of tacks. From those, they had to make a candle holder that wouldn’t drip wax. Most people fumble with the tacks and the candle–but the correct solution is to empty the box of tacks, attach it on the wall, and make an ad-hoc sconce. The problem has been considered a classic test of creativity because it requires seeing objects as being useful in ways never intended.

Those that lived abroad for longer solved the problems the fastest–but that same effect wasn’t found among those who had simply traveled abroad. And lest you think that there was self-selection at work–that more creative types are more likely to live abroad–the authors took their experiments a step further. They found that creativity increased when students merely “primed” themselves by recalling time spent adapting to a new culture. Maddux and Galinsky hypothesize that living abroad and adapting to cross-cultural challenges flexes your mind in ways that can be readily applied to other real-world situations.